Today we compare the performance of two new ATI Radeon high-end graphics chips - the Radeon X800XL & X850XT through retail cards from GeCube. After examining each card we compare the performance of each against an nVidia GeForce 6600GT and 6800 Ultra which are what ATI's new cards are aimed at competing against. So, will it be nVidia or ATI in your gaming system? Read on and find out!

By taking the suspense, challenge and visceral charge of the original, and adding startling new realism and responsiveness, Half-Life 2 opens the door to a world where the player's presence affects everything around him, from the physical environment to the behaviors even the emotions of both friends and enemies.

We benchmark Half Life 2 with our own custom timedemos as to avoid possible driver optimizations using the "record demo_name" command and loading the timedemo with the "timedemo demo_name" command - For a full list of the commands, click here.

At 1024 X 768 we see that the cards are quite close to each other but the X800XL is even able to get ahead of the 6800 Ultra.

Moving to 1600 X 1200 the gap only becomes larger for ATI with the X800XL having almost 10FPS on the 6800 Ultra and the X850XT having a massive 20FPS on it.